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By  David Craig, on January 4th, 2013 Argentina’s delectable leader once again threatens the Falklands to distract attention from her government’s corruption, economic mismanagement and general incompetence. But perhaps we should congratulate Mrs Kirchner. She’s high up in Kleptowatch’s top “Corruption All Stars” https://100r.org/corruption-allstars/
It’s difficult to know just how much of her citizens’ money the lovely Mrs Kirchner has stolen. Some say it’s less than $100m. But others believe that somewhere around $650m went “missing” when Kirchner and her now dead husband Nestor ran one of Argentina’s provinces (Santa Cruz). The money is reported to have passed through the Cayman Islands to personal bank accounts with Morgan Stanley (Luxembourg) and UBS and Credit Suisse in Switzerland https://rt.com/news/kirchner-president-public-argentina-527/. Due to bank secrecy laws, we don’t know who these personal accounts belong to, but one can make a fairly educated guess, can’t one Mrs Kirchner?
If they can steal $650m just from one province, heaven knows how many hundreds of millions more the Kirchner family have looted since they moved into the presidential palace.
Amongst Kleptowatch’s “Corruption All Stars” are the leaders of such earthly paradises as Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nicaragua and Kazakhstan. So the fragrant Mrs Kirchner has certainly got some pretty stiff competition in the corruption stakes.
Luckily for Kirchner, most Argentinians are so stupid that she’ll get away with her grand larceny and attempts to divert public anger against Britain and away from her own utterly venal and sickening administration that is ruining her country, but making her and her cronies very rich indeed.
Kirchner tries to prop up her misrule by ranting and raving against British “colonialism”. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that, if she’s so against colonialism, then she and all her Latino and ex-Nazi countryfolk and all the other tinpot Latino South American rulers should bugger off back to Spain and Portugal and Germany and hand back their countries to the indigenous people. That would be a good way to end colonialism. How about it, Frau Kirchner?
By David Craig, on January 3rd, 2013 As stock markets shoot up and pundits gush over the supposedly “historic” deal on the U.S. budget, you’d get the impression that the world’s economy has just been saved from disaster. Particulary if you listen to the superficial, politically-correct buffoons the BBC employs as “journalists”. After all, for them anything Saint Obama does is considered a triumph of the forces of democratic good over republican evil.
But once again, the “experts” getting carried away with enthusiasm seem to be confusing deficit with debt and see every attempt to slow the growth of the U.S. deficit as bringing economic salvation. But like Britain, the U.S. is practising that form of economics perfected by those two arrogant, bungling incompetents – Gordon Brown and Ed Balls. We could call their theory “borrownomics”. The laws of Brown’s and Ball’s borrownomics are simple – the more a government borrows and wastes, the wealthier everybody is. It doesn’t occur to Brown, Balls and BBC economic “experts” that governments have to pay interest on borrowed money, which sucks tens of billions out of the economy and that at some point the borrowing has to be repaid.
Hopefully the chart below shows what’s really happening in the U.S. The red line is U.S. government debt. The straight lines indicate how the U.S., practising Brownian and Ballsian borrownomics, keeps raising its debt ceiling – after all, the more you borrow, the better off you are, aren’t you?
By David Craig, on January 2nd, 2013 With all the pundits getting their £1 a word for writing 1,000-word articles predicting what will happen in 2013, I might as well give my unpaid but equally uninformed predictions:
Government debt will go up from just under £1trn to £1.15trn.
Immigration – legal and illegal – will continue to soar as Britain continues to have the most generous benefits rules in the EU for new arrivals
One million Romanian and Bulgarian families will be packing their stuff and buying their coach tickets to come to Britain in 2013/2014 costing us around £30bn which we will have to borrow.
Total aid spending will rise from £8.65bn in the 2012-2013 financial year to £11.3bn in 2013-2014 – an increase of £2.65bn. About 90% of this aid will be lost through corruption, greed and incompetence. This will include hundreds of millions given to hell-holes like Yemen and Somalia to train terrorists to come here and kill us. To Pakistan to buy Chinese jets and subs. To India to buy 146 French Rafael fighters – money that their Finance Minister calls “peanuts”.
Over £20bn will be lost in tax credit fraud and benefit fraud often by very well organized foreign gangs both resident in the UK and overseas.
The NHS will continue to waste hundreds of millions treating foreigners who fly in to use the NHS and then leave without paying their bills. It will not occur to NHS bosses to do what many foreign countries do – confiscate these patients’ passports until their bills are paid.
Around 3 million foreigners will work in the UK doing jobs that useless, feckless, benefits-dependent Brits can’t be bothered to do. Those Brits on benefits will continue to have more children than families where someone actually works.
Hundreds of millions will be spent providing permanent sites for so-called “travellers” who have no intention of travelling anywhere.
Hundreds of millions will be squandered building pointless windfarms which only provide about 10% of their theoretical capacity as there is usually too little or too much wind for them to work. This will push up the cost of energy for families and businesses and lead to thousands of job losses as it won’t be economical for comnpanies to stay in Britain. Meanwhile Germany will build about 25 new coal-fired power stations while we close ours down to satisfy a daft promise made to the EU.
The Daily Mail will publish at least an article a week quoting experts predicting house prices will go up or down or stagnate.
Ed Balls and Ed Miliband will start measuring the curtains in preparation for moving into Downing Street in May 2015.
The Daily Telegraph will continue to publish articles explaining how Cameron can win the 2015 election.
By David Craig, on January 1st, 2013 About 8 months ago, I wrote the following paragraph on my blog:
“Having spent some time in an Asian city that can probably claim to be the sex capital of the world, I could not help noticing some differences in how various nationalities satisfied their sexual needs. (Please note I was with my wife, so had limited opportunities for personal indulgence beyond my permitted twice weekly). Many Japanese, it seems, are training to become gynaecologists as they spend an inordinate amount of time putting various objects – fingers, hands, ice cubes, bottles, rubber penises and so on – into the vaginas of the gogo bar girls. Although there are thousands of stunning, slim Asian beauties available, Arabs tend to choose the fattest, ugliest women they can find – the fatter, the better for them. Most Russians here have come with their families, but one solo male I talked with explained “we Russians, we like f–k asshole”. Rather than taking one girl each, Indians tend to go in groups of 4 to 5 men and take one girl for the whole group. What they then do with the girl, I hate to imagine. But at least she probably earns more in one bruising session than most other workers earn in a week.”
It was really quite striking how Indian men “hunted in packs” and you would usually see four, five or even six Indian men negotiating with a single Thai prostitute, rather than one man taking one girl. Many times I would even see girls refuse to go with a pack of Indian men, however much money they offered. Presumably, the girls knew what they would be forced to do and how they would be treated.
By David Craig, on December 31st, 2012 The most distinguishing characteristic of the last decade or so must be the rise of incompetence throughout the whole public sector and political classes. The incompetent are too many to list, so here I’ll just mention a few.
As the NHS has doubled its budget yet gone from 8 beds per manager to 3.6 beds per manager, perhaps the person who best personifies the rise of the utterly useless is Cynthia Bower. Bower was head of the strategic health authority that was responsible for the mid-Staffordshire hospital where hundreds died from appalling lack of care. Laughably she was promoted to head of the Care Quality Commission – responsible for patient care throughout the NHS.
Then there’s Hector Sants, boss of the FSA as its budget shot up to £500m a year while it completely failed to regulate the banks and stood idly by doing nothing during the greatest financial crash in British history. His incompetence was rewarded in the New Year’s honours list.
At the Bank of England, liar and buffoon (IMHO) Mervyn King was knighted and had millions of our money stuffed in his pension pot as a reward for utter failure. The only saving grace at the BoE was that neither of the other (IMHO) liars and buffoons – Paul Tucker and Charles Bean – was given the useless Mervyn King’s job.
Two other regulators – Ofgem and Ofwat – have also distinguished themselves by doing nothing at all to regulate the energy and water markets while increasing their own budgets, salaries and bonuses every year including every year since the financial meltdown.
Then there’s the extraordinary Lin Homer, former chief executive of Birmingham City Council. Ms Homer ran Birmingham from 2002 to 2005, when she was responsible for 57,000 council staff. But her period at the council was marred by a postal voting scandal which led a judge to order fresh elections in two Birmingham wards. Election judge Richard Mawrey said fraud in the city “would have disgraced a banana republic”. Ms Homer ran into fresh difficulties when she became Director General of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and allowed hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to come to and stay in Britain. And now she is the new Permanent Secretary at the Department for Transport, earning £155,000 a year.
We also had George Entwhistle at the BBC, the hopeless Baroness Ashton running the EU’s diplomatic service and two clowns – Barroso and Van Rompuy – from bankrupt, basket-case non-countries (Portugal and Belgium) in charge of the EU.
In British politics, our worst ever chancellor, Gordon Liar Brown, was promoted to PM as a reward for bankrupting Britain. Then when the Coalition got in, David Cameron seems to have thought it appropriate to make one of his dimmest chums chancellor rather than giving the job to someone with the faintest smidgin of competence. Meanwhile, in the Labout Party the two people who might have been able to pull Britain out of the economic catastrophe inflicted by Brown – David Miliband and Alastair Darling – have been shunted aside in favour of the incompetent Brown’s utterly incompetent bag carriers – Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.
God help us!
By David Craig, on December 30th, 2012 That great parliamentarian, Labour MP Keith Vaz, has once again graced us with his great wisdom as he claims that events like Hillsborough and Plebgate have caused the public to lose confidence in the integrity of the police. A politician questioning the integrity of the police? Immediate thoughts of pots and kettles? After all, how much confidence do the public have in the integrity of our politicians?
But Mr Vaz is not just any ordinary politician. Reportedly his nickname in the Commons is “Vazeline” as he has been involved in scandal after scandal after scandal, but nothing ever sticks. Why? Probably because he is Britain’s longest-serving Asian MP and has been protected by Labour Party bosses as he is seen as crucial to getting the Asian vote.
Mr Vaz has been the subject of not one but two parliamentary enquiries into his (lack of?) integrity. He once resigned as a minister – supposedly for “health reasons” though he seems to be awfully healthy to me. The Telegraph revealed that he had claimed £75,000 in expenses for a flat in Westminster even though his £1m+ family home was just 12 miles from Parliament and he flipped his second home twice in one year.
I have also been told that Mr Vaz was “hosted” by accountants Deloittes when a Deloittes team headed by the lovely Fred “the shred” Goodwin allegedly defrauded BCCI creditors (many of them Mr Vaz’s constituents) of over £30m. This is, of course, just hearsay. But it’s not the first time the honourable Mr Vaz has been linked with the “dark side”. Indeed, Mr Vaz’s “integrity” is so questionable that even the grovellingly pro-Labour and pro-Asian Guardian seemed to celebrate when Vaz was criticised following one of the two parliamentary enquiries into his not always transparent financial affairs. The Guardian’s leader headline was “THE RIGHT ENDING Elizabeth Filkin finally nails Keith Vaz”.
Like probably most of the public, I believe virtually all our MPs are lying, hypocritical, expenses-fiddling, thieving, selfish, incompetent scum. Moroever, they are largely unnecessary as we don’t need 650 MPs any more. With the EU and regional assemblies making most of our laws, 200 MPs would be quite enough. So, perhaps our arrogant, self-serving politicians should be a little more circumspect when criticising parts of the public sector (like the police) which may be going through a crisis in public confidence, but are still held in much higher regard than our worthless, corrupt, own-nest-feathering politicians.
By David Craig, on December 29th, 2012 Apologies if you already know about this (IMHO) massive rip-off on tickets to concerts and sporting events, but I just found out about it. It goes like this:
I saw an ad in the Sunday Times for a tour by Bruce Springsteen. I tried to buy tickets at www.ticketmaster.co.uk as directed in the ad. Unfortunately every type of ticket was sold out. But helpfully, ticketmaster.co.uk directed me to another website www.getmein.com where loads of tickets for all areas of the stadium were available – at 2 to 3 times the original price. So I tried the other website cited in the Sunday Times ad – www.livenation.co.uk. Once again, all tickets were sold out. But once again I was directed to www.getmein.com where tickets to all parts of the stadium were available – of course, at 2 to 3 times the face price.
I did a little googling and found out that www.getmein.co.uk was originally a website where “members of the public” (actually, ticket touts) could sell supposedly “unwanted” tickets at whatever price they thought they could get. But the firm that owns ticketmaster.co.uk bought www.getmein.com in 2008. I believe what is really happening is that the firm owning the websites is creaming off thousands (probably tens of thousands) of tickets and then touting them through its www.getmein.com website at several times the real price. If they sold say 40,000 tickets at double the face value, they’d make an extra £2.5m from just one Bruce Springsteen concert.
Apparently, for a Rolling Stones concert, www.getmein.com was flogging £400 tickets for up to £15,000. Of course, Ticketmaster deny they are selling their own tickets through www.getmein.com. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the same firm also owns www.livenation.co.uk and the whole set-up is just a massive scam to cheat music and sports fans.
I wonder if Bruce Springsteen knows that this (IMHO) huge scam is going on. I wonder if he cares. I wonder if he and his promoter are also in on the scam so they too can earn lots more money. Who knows?
You can read more at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2221371/Fury-Ticketmaster-directs-Rolling-Stones-fans-touts-website-charging-15-000-ticket.html
By David Craig, on December 28th, 2012 Whatever the Government tries to do, the useless, wasteful, politically-correct BBC always manages to find thousands of supposed “victims” whose lives will supposedly be “ruined”. It never seems to occur to the BBC that people have to take some responsibility for their own lives. This search for victims usually reaches a crescendo at around Christmas.
This morning the BBC excelled itself by highlighting the case of a 30-year-old female doctor who had “struggled with anorexia for years” and was found dead in her London flat after starving herself. Who was responsible? The Government of course. The brutal cuts to the NHS, according to the BBC, meant the doctor didn’t get the help she needed. But there have been no cuts to the NHS budget, In fact, the NHS is getting around twice as much money as it did a decade ago. Moreover, didn’t the doctor’s parents have any responsibility? Not according to the BBC. Didn’t the doctor herself have any responsibility? After all, she was a doctor and so knew what she was doing and where she could get help. Not according to the BBC. No, the Government was responsible and the only solution was to give billions more of our money to incompetent, overpaid, worthless NHS managers to waste. Remember, in 1997 the NHS had over 8 beds per manager. But because the NHS has doubled the number of managers while reducing the number of beds, there are now just 3.5 beds per manager.
Talking of useless, overpaid, overpromoted, unnecessary managers, the BBC could teach the NHS a thing or two. There are about 40 BBC managers earning more than the Prime Minister and over the last few years the BBC has wasted around £277m of our money giving unbelievably generous redundancy payments to its own staff – some of whom immediately returned to their old BBC jobs minutes after getting 5-figure redundancy payments. Within this £277m, was £8m of our money handed to just 20 no doubt delighted BBC executives – an average of £400,000 each.
It’s time to cut the worthless BBC down to size by reducing its budget by 5% (£150m) a year for the next five years and to force the BBC to produce what its charter says – public service broadcasting. Producing crap and reality shows and celeb garbage should be left to the increasing number of commercial TV stations.
By David Craig, on December 25th, 2012 As most of you probably work, you won’t see much daytime TV. But there is one programme you should record to see when you get home – “You’ve been scammed” on BBC1 at 11.00 a.m. Mondays to Fridays. It’s estimated that scam artists cheat Brits out of around £8bn a year – that’s £22m a day. The scams can be selling worthless shares, fine wine investments, land, carbon credit certificates or getting money by fooling people they’ve won a foreign lottery and just need to send some administration money to receive their prize.
You’d think nobody would be stupid enough to fall for these schemes. But millions do every year and the victims are mainly the elderly and the vulnerable (recently bereaved, people living on their own, the disabled and so on).
This £8bn is pure theft. It doesn’t include all the crap supposed “investments” we are sold by our banks. For example, we have £58bn in so-called “structured products”. These usually promise to pay say 120% of any rise in the stock market over five years, but guarantee to return all a saver’s money if the stock market falls. Those who put £58bn into these structured products apparently don’t realise that stock markets go up by at most around 1% a year and that almost all the benefits of owning shares come from reinvesting the dividends paid so these compound over time. But with structured products, the saver doesn’t get any benefits from the dividends. The only guarantee with these products is that the saver will get back less than if they had just left their money in a fixed-term savings account, while the banks will make billions. Most of those with their savings in these products are over fifty, with many older than that.
The bottom line is that scammers and banks prey on those who have savings – usually those who are getting on in years. So a necessary but difficult conversation we all need to have with any elderly parents, grandparents or other relatives is: Were do they have their money? How much do they have? Who has been approaching them to get hold of their savings? And have they put any money into schemes which are either scams or just virtually worthless “investments” being flogged by their bank?
This is not an easy conversation to start (for obvious reasons). It makes it look like we’re checking how much we’ll get when they pop their clogs. It’s also difficult as we need to start treating people we looked up to for most of our lives almost as vulnerable children. But if we can have this conversation, it may be one of the best Christmas presents we can give. Happy Christmas.
By David Craig, on December 24th, 2012 Investing genius Warren Buffett is credited with saying that it’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who has been swimmig naked. Many people seem to think that the 2007-2015 financial crisis is a difficult but temporary event that will soon be forgotten as the world’s economies start to grow again. In fact, it’s equivalent to the tide going out and exposing that most Western democracies are naked and bankrupt. Their politicians have borrowed and borrowed and borrowed to keep up the illusion we can afford the welfare state where almost everyone gets benefits and tax credits and healthcare and pensions and housing and schooling and much more, supposedly paid for by other people.
There was (perhaps surprisingly) an excellent article in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9762510/The-truth-is-that-politicians-are-telling-lies.html
In it, columnist Janet Daley argues that the financial crisis has exposed the Western welfare state as being unaffordable – you cannot have a society where most people expect to take more out than they put in. But no politician dares admit the truth as they know they won’t be elected. So they all lie to cover up their nakedness in the hope of getting into power and then they tinker at the edges of the economy, trying to look like they’re doing something but not really changing anything, to avoid civil unrest and keep their jobs. Meanwhile the rats – politicians, bureaucrats, eurocrats, business bosses, BBC executives and bankers – all loot the sinking ship for as much money as they can before the stupid, X-Factor-obsessed public realises what’s going on.
Under Labour, our debt reached over £700bn. Under the Coalition it’s going to hit £1.4trn. One day, we wil have to start paying this back. This means an extremely painful adjustment as the majority of us will have to take less from government than we put in. And even if we managed to start paying back our debt at £10bn a year, it would take 70 years to get back to where we were when the Coalition took over and 140 years to be debt-free like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and others.
So, prepare for at least 140 years of austerity. Oh, yes and have a great Christmas. Hopefully you’ll get a lot of money in your Christmas stocking as you’ll need it to pay for the 33% increase in taxes that was in the small print of Osborne’s last budget.
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